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Folks who have previously tried out Dark Vale Games' Forge will want to swing by the game for another look at the end of April thanks to four months of crunch work by the dev team to implement features that were unable to be included at launch.

Wrong: We launched too early

We know we launched an incomplete game. Being an indie studio we did not have the luxury of spending four more months developing Forge without seeing any revenue. While Forge is an indie, it’s not like we’re 4 guys in a garage living on Top Raman and KFC Bowls. We had 50 team members at one point during development, and a regular skeleton crew of 25. These are all talented and industry-experienced people with families to feed and bills to pay. We raised enough money to ensure we could recruit and maintain the team we wanted. Our funding was finite though, and we had no choice but to launch the core game on Steam in December. At that point, we believed we had enough of a game to get people hooked so that by the time they were fully vested in the game we would have updates ready for them. While we did get people hooked early on, we still felt some backlash from players who wanted a bigger game at launch. We don’t blame them. If we had our way, we would have waited to ship in April instead of December so everything after that could have been gravy, not biscuit. Gravy takes time, however, and money, and we needed to start seeing a return from sales or risk starving. We had to hold off on some of the biscuit and ship it with the gravy. We took our chances on an early launch and felt some of the pain from that. Thankfully it was relatively mild pain and our community is still just as behind us as they were when we launched the beta. We stand behind that choice, but it wasn’t ideal for sure.

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I didn't think that this game was a bad game. I mean it needed some improvements but what game doesnt now adays. It is good to see that the company behide Forge knows what they need to work on. I would love to see this game become more sucessful.

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I thought the game was really fun actually. It wasn't bad at all, I spent a good few nights playing it for a few hours each night. The only issue I ran into was the lack of features like matchmaking, and some games wouldn't find other players (maybe due to lack of other people, but not sure). I am gonna definately try it again after they patch this stuff.

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Also have this game. It reminded me of Fury as a few others mentioned. I've enjoyed both games. I just haven't committed anything to it, because I simply thought it was an outlet for pvp whenever I was really bored. After reading this letter from the devs - I am a bit more inspired to check out this game again with the re-launch. Hoping for their success.

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You know i have more respect for people like this that admit they were not releasing a triple a product,i always know it,just so many seem to defend even the cheapest looking games.

I feel most of the people using common sense also realize it is about money,nobody works for free.

There is a big problem with developers all doing this and that is ,once you release that sub par product ,it is near impossible to get the players back.I wish all developers success,but i also wish for top notch Triple A games,not games that go part way there.

I have a saying and i still stick by it,if you can`t EASILY and comfortably get into this market,you should stay away.As this guy stated,they THOUGHT they had enough to hook players in until they could finish the game.

I think that is being extremely naive becuase it is never enough,the majority of gamers are asking for more not less and right out of the box.

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Well that was a pretty refreshing read. I wanted to check this game out but I was a bit worried how much meat was on the bone and it did not seem like it was getting a large player base (don't feel like waiting forever to queue for a match)so I passed. I'll have to see how things fare after this update and maybe I might finally get it.

1. For god's sake mmo gamers, enough with the analogies. They're unnecessary and your comparisons are terrible, dissimilar, and illogical.

2. To posters feeling the need to state how f2p really isn't f2p: Players understand the concept. You aren't privy to some secret the rest are missing. You're embarrassing yourself.

3. Yes, Cpt. Obvious, we're not industry experts. Now run along and let the big people use the forums for their purpose.

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Originally posted by Panther2103I thought the game was really fun actually. It wasn't bad at all, I spent a good few nights playing it for a few hours each night. The only issue I ran into was the lack of features like matchmaking, and some games wouldn't find other players (maybe due to lack of other people, but not sure). I am gonna definately try it again after they patch this stuff.

Glad you enjoyed our game! Coincidentally, we've got a basic matchmaking system in now, as well as server browsing (with private servers). Ranked Arena is also right around the corner (crucial feature for obvious reasons). With the DLC coming out this week, plus a new patch today and major promotions on Steam, we expect to see a ton of new players for the rerelease. I'm sure I'll see you in game sometime soon!

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Wow, thanks for showing us respect for our display of honesty about the development behind Forge. It really means a lot to us to see such awesome support from the community - you guys rock!

If you haven't tried the game yet, or tried it early on and took some time off, definitely give it another go. Of course, I'm biased, but we seriously put a ton of work into making Forge the ultimate PvP experience, and I think you'll see that we've actually achieved that goal. We've changed the experience for new players ENTIRELY, making it much easier to learn how to play Forge effectively, and added a ton of new content that gives the game some real depth.